December 2nd: Prepare Your Heart for Christ

How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?

JOHN 5:44

God owns and controls all things. And there is nothing that he could give you for Christmas this year that would suit your needs and your longings better than the consolation of Israel and the redemption of Jerusalem, restoration for past losses and liberation from future enemies, forgiveness and freedom, pardon and power, healing the past and sealing the future.

If there is a longing in your heart this Christmas for something that the world has not been able to satisfy, might not this longing be God’s Christmas gift preparing you to see Christ as consolation and redemption and to receive him for who he really is?

How is the heart prepared to receive Christ for who he really is? It is very simple.

First, the heart must become disenchanted with the praise of men. “How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from God?” (John 5:44; 7:17–18).

Second, the heart must become disenchanted with the sufficiency of money and things to satisfy the soul. “The Pharisees, who were lovers of money, heard all these things, and they ridiculed him” (Luke 16:14).

Then, third, alongside this disenchantment with the praise of men and the power of money, there must come into the heart a longing for consolation and a redemption beyond what the world can give.

Fourth and finally, there must be a revelation from God the Father, opening the eyes of the heart so that it cries out, like a man who stumbles onto an incredible treasure, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God, the consolation of my past, the redemption of my future. Now I see you. Now I receive you—for who you really are.”

May God do this for you this Christmas. May this be your gift, and your witness, and the testimony of many this Christmas.

December 1: A Search and Save Mission

The Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.

LUKE 19:10

In this season of the year, we focus on the meaning of the coming of the Son of God into the world. And the spirit of our celebration should be the spirit in which he came. And the spirit of that coming is summed up in Luke 19:10: “The Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”

The coming of Jesus was a search-and-save mission. “The Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”

Christmas is a season for thinking about the mission of God to seek and to save lost people from the wrath to come. God raised him from the dead, “Jesus who delivers us from the wrath to come” (1 Thess. 1:10). It’s a season for cherishing and worshiping this characteristic of God—that he is a searching and saving God, that he is a God on a mission, that he is not aloof or passive or indecisive. He is never in the maintenance mode, coasting or drifting. He is sending, pursuing, searching, saving. That’s the meaning of Christmas.

The book of Acts is a celebration of this Christmas heart of God’s—on the move to seek and to save the lost. It’s a narration of Jesus’s ongoing arrival into the lives of more and more peoples of the world. Acts is the story of how the early church understood the words, “As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you” (John 20:21). It’s the story of how the vertical arrival of God in the mission of Jesus bends out and becomes the horizontal arrival of Jesus in the mission of the church. In us.

Jesus came into the world at the first Christmas, and every Christmas since is a reminder of his continual arrival into more and more lives. And that arrival is, in fact, our arrival - our coming, our moving into the lives of those around us and into the peoples of the world.

Beginning December 1st through December 25th join us as we prep for Christmas

Our lives move so fast that is easy to go through the holiday season and miss the all the things that make Christmas so special. We want to invite you to read along with us each day during the month of December leading up to Christmas so that together we can learn what it means to treasure Christ as our ultimate gift. We hope that you will join us.